Doodling for Dollars: Graphic Facilitation in the Wall Street Journal

April 25, 2012

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

Doodling for Dollars: Firms Try to Get Gadget-Obsessed Workers to Look Up—and Sketch Ideas
Several weeks ago we spoke with Rachel Silverman at the Wall Street Journal about how companies are encouraging employees to put down their smart phones and start drawing out their inspiration. We were please to see that they not only mentioned the benefits of graphic facilitation and how doodling increases memory retention, but they also included an ImageThink Tips-n-Tricks Illustration providing simple ways to incorporate visual learning into your company meetings.

“It’s natural to start drawing stuff. You just grab a marker and you start drawing,” says Audra Kalfass, a Citrix software-development engineer. She says she is a “horrible” artist. Nevertheless, “it doesn’t take much artistic ability to communicate visually. You don’t have to be amazing artists… It’s mostly boxes and lines and stuff like that to get your point across.”

We are pleased to see that our friend Sunni Brown and many of our clients (Facebook, Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.) spoke about their experience with Graphic Facilitaion.

Jeffrey Murray, principal test manager for the Microsoft Corp. MSFT +1.11% unit, says his team often starts with whiteboard sketches and cartoonlike storyboards when considering new product features.
Sketches help “get everyone on the same page and can convey the emotion and experience of the user,” he says. Eventually, the images are transferred to PowerPoint decks, he says. Inevitably, developers sketch and scribble over the deck’s whiteboard projections.